1969 Ford Torino Talladega - Aero Warrior

Every project car has its mysteries. If you’re lucky, you’re only a few owners down the line; between VIN numbers, paperwork, and conversations, you can figure out where your car was built, who owned it before you, and sometimes even how that dried-up bag of weed got in the steering column. When your project car is a genuine ’69 NASCAR racer, the challenge of pinpointing who, what, when, and where becomes more difficult. In the ’60s, no one built a race car expecting it to still be on the track in 2013. Heck, half the time, they didn’t expect the car to make it through one race.

For Ron Myska, tracking down the history of his 1969 Ford Torino Talladega has been almost as interesting as getting it back on the racetrack. In the process of discovering the car’s true identity, Ron also learned about the technology of building a race car during the aero wars in the late ’60s: That period of stock car racing when Ford and Chrysler really pushed the series from mildly souped-up factory cars to specialized racing machines with modified bodies and engine combinations not available in any dealers’ showroom.

Though Chrysler’s winged Daytonas and Superbirds are well known, Ford’s and Mercury’s respective Talladegas and Cyclone Spoiler IIs claimed their share of victories. In fact, the Blue Oval camp was the first to figure out aerodynamically effective designs for its NASCAR program by heavily reworking its intermediate cars into aero warriors.

2/24Ron Myska’s 1969 Ford Talladega began life as a Torino with a nose job. The fenders were extended and streamlined, as was the hood. The car is all metal, no fiberglass here. The stock bracing was removed, and thinner supports were riveted in place. That flat inset front bumper is a modified rear bumper, tilted and doing double duty as an air dam.

Super Speedway DNA

The full name for a NASCAR-spec 1969 Talladega might more accurately be a “Holman Moody Ford Fairlane Torino Cobra Talladega” as the cars were based on the fastback hardtop Fairlane Cobra but sold as Torino Talladegas, and the early street versions were partially designed and built bwy the famed Holman Moody race shop. The Talladega was longer and lower than the Fairlane, with a flush grille capping off extended and streamlined fenders. NASCAR crew chiefs took the cars even further by channeling the body, replacing the rear glass with acrylic, and running the car with the 600hp Boss 429—an engine option never available in the street versions.

3/24This is a real Boss 429, which was never available in a production Torino—only in the Mustang. NASCAR somehow let the fact the public couldn’t buy a 429-powered Torino slip through the cracks. “Stock” cars, these weren’t. Ford managed to get the Talladega body and the 429 engine homologated separately; the early cars raced with Le Mans–winning 427 side-oiler engines. The street-car buyers had to be satisfied with the 428ci Cobra Jet engine.

Ron first met his Talladega while it was in disguise. The car belonged to his friend Doug Schultz and was painted in blue-and-gold David Pearson livery. Doug was driving the Ford in various historical events when rumors reached him that it might not be Pearson’s No. 17 car. Thus began his search through old photos to find the truth.

Tracking down a stock car’s history isn’t as easy as it might seem. There were only a few builders for the factory-supported teams back in ’60s, and they would re-body a chassis at the start of a season or any time the panels were damaged beyond repair. This means that photos from ’68, ’69, and ’70 might show a car with the same chassis, just with updated bodywork.

Beginning as far back as 1965, the cars going to the builders from Detroit were no longer serial-numbered frames off the UAW assembly lines but rather “body-in-white” vehicles, with few identifying numbers. By the end of the ’60s, there was almost no paper trail following these chassis as they went from racer to racer.

4/24Regular Torinos had an inset grille, but the Talladega’s is flush and covered with mesh to protect the radiator from debris. Each car was built differently; here we see the air intake in the center of the bumper and grille. In archive photos the placement varies. “These cars weren’t dialed-in back then,” Ron says.

That’s how it worked back then, and even today. The factories sent specialized components to a few select builders, who “rented” the finished race cars to sponsored teams where they were further tuned and tweaked to suit the drivers. At the end of the season, they went back to the builders and were re-bodied, or, if they were deemed unfit for top-shelf teams, sold on down through the ranks of privateers in smaller series.

“Stock cars got raced and raced and raced,” says automotive historian Dr. John Craft. “First Grand National, then Modified Sportsman and before you know it, they’d be running the bullring at some dirt track in Peoria, Illinois.”

Spared the Demolition Derby

Lucky for Ron, his car never ended up running figure-eight races at the fairgrounds. Doug was able to find photos of the Talladega pre-restoration, and from those he determined an independent driver named Rick Newsom last raced the car around 1973. Doug tracked down a former crewman of Newsom’s who distinctly remembered his boss growing frustrated with the tight clearances between the right-side chassis-brace tube and the huge Boss 429. He said Newsom solved the problem with a sledgehammer, and when Doug checked the car, he found the tube smashed as described. With growing confidence, he worked backward in time.

8/24The rear quarter panels are pushed out for tire clearance. The rear window is inset and barred to keep it from blowing out at speed. Plexiglas takes the place of traditional glass, and the rear bumper is smoothed off with sheetmetal panels.

"Our ultimate goal is to have the opportunity to take the car to the Goodwood Festival in England. Let's hope that we get an invitation!"—Ron Myska

Newsom had purchased the car from racer James Hylton, who’d bought it wrecked from Junior Johnson’s team, where Lee Roy Yarbrough had driven it. Junior campaigned cars built by Holman Moody during those years, and as Doug went through his machine he found many distinctive features to support the validity of the car’s pedigree.

“The [race] cars back then weren’t identical the way they are now,” Craft says. “Things like welds, or the way a particular bracket was constructed, those were unique to the builder and can be matched up against old photos to figure out if a car is real—or a reproduction. Welds are like fingerprints. They are very distinctive.”

The Talladega featured many Holman Moody signatures, from the construction of the rear bracing to the interior details. Once Doug felt confident the car was definitely raced under Yarbrough’s No. 98, he repainted it in Lee Roy’s cream-and-red color scheme. The only remaining uncertainty was the bodywork. Dr. Craft believes the chassis was built in 1970, but that doesn’t mean that the ’69 body that’s on it is wrong. “Grand National teams were allowed to use the same car for three consecutive years,” he explains. “So the builders would re-body the previous year’s chassis with the new model-year body. Ford was on a two-year body cycle. The body for ’68 and ’69 was the same car. In ’70 and ’71 there was a new body style, but the ’70 Torino was a poor performer aerodynamically, so many teams went back to racing the ’69.”

Return to the Track

For Ron, who bought the Talladega from Doug after the repaint, all the mystery and madness surrounding its origins does nothing to detract from the thrill of driving the monster on the track. Ron has a history in winged sprint car racing and is still involved with sprint cars today, but he’d always wanted to race a stock car. “You had to be tough to drive these things,” he says, and on the day we met him at the Coronado Speed Festival in San Diego, California, he looked every bit the tough NASCAR racer, sweaty and rumpled as he clambered over the windowsill to talk to us. Ron’s car was the oldest in the Vintage Stock Car Class that weekend, and despite knowing it was one of less than 750 Talladegas built—even fewer of which ever made it to NASCAR specs—it sure looked like a street car escaped from the show ’n’ shine when seen beside the stamped-out template cars of the ’90s.

17/24Although cars racing NASCAR in 1969 were already well beyond what consumers at the time could actually purchase at a dealer, there were still many stock components used. No fancy filler necks here, just a regular fuel cap with a wire. They didn’t start using the quick-connect fillers until around 1973.

21/24 In these shots you can see the unique exhaust design, the cooler on the rearend, and the protective cover over the oil pump belt.

"It's important to preserve the car's history, but also to drive it and be safe."—Ron Myska

Parked in the pits, the Talladega’s turned-down nose and flattened back window made it look like it was still going fast. “Climb in,” Ron offered, and we didn’t need to be asked twice. We landed in the driver seat with all the grace of a drunken monkey and immediately noticed something: There’s a working cigarette lighter. Look past the taped-off steering wheel, allow your gaze to slide over the panel of toggle switches with its distinctive lower case “holman moody” font, and look past the original Sun gauges in their woodgrain-printed dash, and there between the temperature and the oil pressure gauges is a stock Ford cigarette lighter. Why? Because this is a race car from the days when men drove 500 miles in tennis shoes and smoked while they did it. Just sitting in the cockpit blisters your hands and burns your toes. It’s the real deal, and thanks to Ron Myska, Doug Schultz, and the experts who helped them trace the car’s history, we can imagine back to when seeing a field of these 3,800-pound heavyweights was just another day at the races.

Lee Roy Yarbrough was a brawler, shy around journalists, but by all accounts fearless on the track. He had a “win it or wreck it” philosophy and was so intimidating that even Dan Gurney recalls him as a formidable opponent.

Yarbrough (no relation to Cale Yarborough) raced Trans-Am and Indy as well as NASCAR, but it was in a stock car that he had his best results. He had done well ever since he started racing in 1957 at the age of 19, but when he hooked up with Junior Johnson in 1967, he started getting really top-notch cars. By 1969, the team had jelled, and Lee Roy took seven wins that year, two in Mercurys and five in Holman Moody Talladegas. He also had 21 Top-10 finishes—not too shabby considering he entered less than 30 races.

In the ’70s, things started going wrong for everyone. Ford cut its racing budget by 75 percent, and the new Ford bodies had aerodynamic problems. Lee Roy crashed hard during a tire test and began suffering memory lapses and behaving strangely. He would miss races or pull in early. By 1973, he was done as a driver, but the story doesn’t end there.

In 1980, Lee Roy was arrested for trying to strangle his mother in their living room. Since he was obviously too mentally ill to be jailed, Lee Roy was committed to a mental hospital, where he died from a seizure four years later. It was a sad end for a man who once ruled the aero kingdom.

Readers Rank It

23/24Ron drives the Talladega in vintage racing events, so he’s made a few changes to meet safety regulations and remain competitive. The expanded wheelwells are accurate for ’69 NASCAR but would only have been seen on road-race cars. More common was the superspeedway setup with lower fender lips and tighter wheel clearances.

Is this car firing on all eight? Here’s the score from a poll of HOT ROD readers, 1 piston is the worst score, 8 is the best.

So in the flurry of streamlining and engine-banning and driver-swapping, which manufacturer won the aero battle? It’s not quite as simple as just looking at the wins for 1969 and 1970. The four companies involved didn’t all have what we’d consider to be “aero” cars on the track at the same time. Ford brought out the Mercury Spoiler II and the Torino Talladega at the beginning of 1969. Dodge had the Charger 500, which wasn’t terribly competitive, and didn’t introduce the winning Daytona until September of that year.

Plymouth wasn’t even in the fight until 1970, when the Ford-sponsored teams were hit with budget cuts. The lack of overlap makes it easy to argue that any of the aero models could have been the winningest, if only they’d been allowed to race for longer. There’s also the opinion that the aerodynamic changes only mattered on the superspeedways and road courses. To give you something to fight about, here’s the breakdown of wins by “aero” models on “aero” tracks, straight from the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
Aero War Wins 1969 and 1970
Ford: 16
Dodge: 7
Plymouth: 8
Mercury: 8